EVER dapper, booted and suited with his hat and walking cane, Rob Harding cuts quite a dash.

He also makes an unlikely addition to the scrum of singers, songwriters and performers jostling for a place in the charts - particularly those who hang out amid the surfers of the South West.

Yet at 64 years of age Harding, who retired from his position as media director at Christchurch-based advertising company Carrington-Caunter Associates two years ago, is convinced that a curious kind of pop fame awaits.

He's already enjoyed a little taste of pop-tastic celebrity with the release of his novelty single If Only The Pope Had Wings. Put out twice last year, as a summer and Christmas single, it received a small but pleasing amount of UK airplay and Harding was interviewed by seven different radio stations across the UK.

It also created a frisson of excitement in Australia and more surprisingly perhaps Fox News in the States played it daily coast to coast.

Now, after two years in the studio, Harding has an album out too called Pint of Shrimps Bundle, and currently available on iTunes.

Although long-time Swanage resident Harding decamped to Penzance in deepest Cornwall more than a year ago, he seems umbilically tied to the Purbecks.

Bean-pole thin and with his panama hat and copy of the Daily Telegraph under his arm, he could have stepped straight out of an old time British B-movie. He's spectacularly visually at odds with the local beach boys in their cut-offs and hoodies.

His constant hankering for his old Swanage haunts simply adds to the image of a man out of place.

"I keep going back to Swanage and wondering if I made a terrible mistake ever leaving," he admits.

He's speaking to me on his mobile from a street cafe on the Penwith peninisula. Gull cries threaten to drown the conversation. Then a low rumbling and Wooooosh... crunch! Harding admits he's nearly been taken out by a passing skateboarder.

He famously has a hooter on the handle of his walking stick. It's somewhat inadequate in situations like this.

Needless to say, his recording is done closer to his spiritual home at the Room With A View studio near Ringwood.

The "Shrimps" album features an impressive array of local session musicians, such as Carl Chamberlain, Bob Mace , Martin Kitcher, Steve Darrel Smith, Damon Sawyer and Sophie Rhodes, The music is a strange hybrid, a curious mix of old-style jazz, blues, music hall, variety theatre favourites and seaside novelty songs.

"I have no genre but I love the music of the '20s, '30s and '40s - Al Jolson, Bessie Smith, all that kind of thing," says Harding. "I was a child of the '60s so there are elements of that in there as well."

Meanwhile, there's Loving Kisses A Million and Unrequited Love, a couple of tracks that he's punting at American Country and Western stations without much notable success. But even though he claims he's spent £17,000 of his own money in pursuit an as yet largely unsung music career, Rob Harding remains undaunted.

"I want fame and fortune. I don't think there's anything wrong with that," he tells me.

Now he's looking forward to recording another weird and wonderful gem called Miss Lucy Had A Baby which is due for release at the end of October. "Plenty of ukuleles... It's an old children's song," announces Harding, as if that explains everything.

"You really are very eccentric," I say. "A lot of people say that," he replies.

"But I don't think I am. I think everyone else is."

  • More information at robhardingproductions.com and prenigma.com.